Rarely has the benefit and risk of the loftiest of ministerial portfolios been so compellingly put.

If Finance is the most visible and powerful of cabinet jobs, it is also a fabled burial ground for leadership dreams of the politically ambitious.

For even though economics is the gloomiest of sciences, the budgets that are any finance minister’s chief task have provided some of Canada’s most dramatic — and absurd — political moments.

As budget season cranks up again, it’s worth recalling that they are always as much political as fiscal documents, especially for minority governments.

For them, budgets are matters of survival — designed to placate and accommodate. Or, if a government is feeling frisky, not.

If that’s the case, they’re studded with calculated provocations, policy commissions or omissions opponents will find impossible to support.

In 1974, Pierre Trudeau claimed to have engineered his government’s own defeat over a John Turner budget that thumbed its nose at New Democrats who had supported the minority Liberals for two years. For the first time, a Canadian government fell over a budget. And Trudeau’s gambit won him a majority.

The most notorious budget of modern times was probably that leading to the defeat of Joe Clark’s government in 1979 — less a matter of unpalatable fiscal measures (though its 18-cent-a-gallon gas levy caused a furor) than it was the PC inability to count votes.

In 2005, it took the drastic measure of seducing Conservative Belinda Stronach across the floor with a Liberal cabinet post, and the support of an independent MP dying of cancer, to get a budget passed and save Paul Martin’s minority government. If briefly.

In 2008, though in an economic statement rather than a formal budget, Prime Minister Stephen Harper schemed his way into a jackpot by having Finance Minister Jim Flaherty propose withdrawing public subsidy for political parties.

Only the shuttering of Parliament, and whipping up of anti-separatist hysteria, enabled Harper to dodge a non-confidence bullet.

The job of finance minister has evolved hugely over the last half-century.

Once upon a time, the task was so manageable that Ontario premier Leslie Frost, when taking office in 1949, kept the Treasury portfolio himself.

The globe seemed larger then and the pace of change more leisurely. Now, as Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan has mused, trying to get a reliable read on things is like trying to set a value “on your house while the kitchen is on fire.”

As such, both the budget consultation process and release of its measures have become more elastic.

In the 1960s, budget proposals were not discussed even in cabinet until the day of presentation and finance minister Walter Gordon once got into hot water for employing outside consultants.

Now, breadth of consultation is a badge of honour and some celebrity bank economists are pretty much de facto cabinet members.

Jean Chrétien, finance minister on his climb to the prime minister’s office, has said “finance is a joint venture of the minister and the bureaucrats.

“They brief him daily on the economic situation, on interest rates, on inflation, on the dollar, on the reserves, on production and on growth. And all these elements become the basis of his decisions.”

Of course, no less a student of such matters than Brian Mulroney has suggested one element trumps all others.

Not long after Bill Clinton assumed the U.S. presidency, Mulroney apparently told him he’d been burned, when new on the job, over a 1985 plan to de-index Old Age Security.

All judgments on fiscal questions should be first and foremost political, he reportedly counselled. “Don’t listen to officials.”

To the bureaucrats, the budget is the charts and graphs and tables. To the minister, it’s in the framing — the speech.

That’s where political theatre meets economic theory — as the minister seeks to demonstrate control, confidence and mastery of his material.

In Ontario, Duncan has gone into the empty legislature chamber at night to practice. When he was finance minister, Chrétien rehearsed in his living room in front of his son every night for a week.

Still, Paul Martin advised that even the best-laid plans are fraught with risk because “something unexpected always happens.” Not least in budget leakage.

In 1989, federal finance minister Michael Wilson presented his budget to a media conference the night before its planned release after a TV reporter appeared on supper-hour newscasts waving a copy of his budget-in-brief.

In 1983, a newspaper reported some of the contents of Ontario treasurer Frank Miller’s imminent budget after an enterprising reporter found discarded drafts in garbage bags outside a printing plant.

As always, a little humility helps.

Walter Gordon told of how a draft of his 1963 budget speech was taken home by a deputy the night before delivery. When the man went out with his wife, he locked it in a briefcase and hid it in a cupboard.

While they were out, the house was burgled, the briefcase found, its lock broken.

But the speech was strewn about the floor — along with all the other articles deemed unfit to steal.

For keepers of government exchequers, the matter was probably best encapsulated almost 20 years ago by Ontario’s Floyd Laughren, during his rocky ride as finance minister of the NDP government.

“When did your government lose its grip on reality?” the late TV reporter Colin Vaughan asked Laughren after he’d presented his budget.

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